Third Way Dispatch

For too long, those of us who support a drawdown in Iraq have offered a laundry list of reasons without a unifying rational. With more than 4,000 American fatalities and tens of thousands of life-altering injuries, it has cost too many lives; at $5,000 per second, it is costing too much money; with our allies looking on in disgust, it is tarnishing our image abroad; with a dizzying array of sectarian conflicts, it is a confusing and unpolice-able civil war; with its pretext long-since exposed as a fraud, it is based on a lie; and with the President’s legacy as “Worst Ever” firmly in place, it is a fruitless attempt to rescue the Bush place in history.

It’s hard for George W. Bush to find a new low, but yesterday he managed. Going to a foreign parliament and issuing a fatuous political attack is perhaps the most classless thing that he has done in the course of a breathtakingly classless presidency. And what an attack it was – standing before the Israeli Knesset, Bush summoned the ghosts of Munich in a loathsome attempt to link Barack Obama to the appeasers of old.

NOTE:This Dispatch is by Third Way Senior Fellow Jonathan Morgenstein:

While I was living in Mexico City in February 1995, the newly elected Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo arrested Raul Salinas, the brother of Zedillo’s powerful and wealthy predecessor, Carlos Salinas. Raul was arrested for a high profile assassination among other suspicions. It was a glorious moment in Mexican history.

Think back for a moment to the days after 9-11, to the range of emotions we all felt: horror, sadness, anger, frustration. But we felt other things as well: determination and patriotism. We were resolved as a nation that no band of two-bit thugs was going to attack this country and murder Americans without us damn well doing something about it.

Now, imagine that you were specifically asked to do something about it and were told that your actions would hold the lives of innocent Americans in the balance. Imagine that you were Mary Smith, a senior executive of a telephone company and that an FBI agent came to you with a letter that asked for your help in tracking down terrorists. The letter assured you that the President and the Attorney General certified that what they were asking you to do was legal. Imagine that the FBI made it clear that if you failed to cooperate, Americans could die.

What would you do? Do you assist the government based on their representations that the help was both legal and urgently needed, or do you decline and risk the consequences?

I’ve been around politics a long time (circa the Mondale “surge”), and I’ve heard enough pandering and disingenuous nonsense spouted to keep aloft a flotilla of blimps. I’ve heard paeans to farmers of useless crops, love letters to members of narrow interest groups, and poetic praise to colorless down-ballot politicians. And all of this from candidates I support!

But rarely have I heard such dispiriting nonsense as that to which we were subjected during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Nevada, when the candidates turned to the subject of nuclear power.

(NOTE: This piece was authored by Third Way’s Senior Policy Fellow for National Security, Jonathan Morgenstein.)

Yesterday, the Department of Defense announced the expected deployment of about 3,000 Marines to shore up the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, the actual central front in the War on Terror, although yet to be finalized by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, is crucial, if very, very tardy. If the Bush administration hadn’t waited six years to talk about such an idea, let alone implement one, perhaps Afghanistan wouldn’t be slipping back toward general chaos right now.